RAIFFEISEN BANKS 133 



character : he must also convince his society that he 

 really merits this testimony. The member of the 

 Schulze-Delitzsch bank is accepted on the strength of 

 his general business reputation, added to his security, 

 personal or material. The member of the Raiffeisen 

 bank, though he have the best of pledges, is rejected 

 unless he is known in his private life to be virtuous and 

 industrious. The man of doubtful sobriety has no 

 chance of obtaining anything from a country bank. 

 The pledge is not itself the fundamental point, but a 

 subsidiary proof of the fundamental point, which is 

 the personal stability of the borrower. It is also an 

 additional safeguard in the interests of depositors 

 against an occasional error of judgment on the part of 

 the society, or against the eventuality of the borrower 

 dying before repayment of the loan, in which case the 

 society requires a definite individual who will discharge 

 in its interest the dead man's outstanding liabilities. 



Furthermore, the society requires to know not only 

 the character of the borrower, but also the specific 

 object for which his loan is destined. It must be 

 satisfied not only that the borrower wishes to employ 

 the loan in his business, but also that the operation 

 proposed is likely to turn out successful. 



Property transfers (Zessionen) are not strictly credit 

 business. They are in the nature of investments for 

 superfluous money, just as a town bank might invest in 

 railway shares, with the difference that the investment 

 is local and designed to meet indirectly the credit wants 

 of members. 



What is the nature of the machinery by which this 

 work is conducted ? A Raiffeisen bank is never what a 

 Schulze-Delitzsch bank sometimes is — a handsome 

 building with barred windows, within which are a 

 number of clerks discharging a constant round of 

 business, while the directors interview special clients 

 in a room apart. It is a small single room, probably at 

 the back of a farm building, opened twice a week and 



